Bbunch may have moved on to the hallowed halls of the Ivy League, but the CCIW-CUNY-Freedom Challenge will not die. Not without a fight anyway. Like Napoleon crowning himself Emperor in 1804, I have assumed responsibility for organizing the Challenge going forward. I'm hoping we can build on what bbunch started and make this into the type of competition that distinguishes D3 Naismith from some of the other HD worlds.

Only problem is, I was a little late in claiming the throne, and at least some of you have already set up most/all of your non-conference schedules for Season 64. So we won't be able to have a full 12-on-12-on-12 challenge that season. Even so, I think that we can still get some games on the schedule for that season, and I personally would like competitive games against CUNY and Freedom whether they are part of a challenge or not. And we might be able to get 7-8 games each week which could be enough for a decent head-to-head comparison that year. If it doesn't work, I plan to still be around for a while so I'll send something out earlier to prep for Season 65.

So let's see what we can still schedule for Season 64. I'm going to follow the same template that bbunch set up for Seasons 62-63:
- Teams in each conference will be seeded 1-12 based on end-of-season 62 RPI
- Each team will play the same seeded team in the other two conferences - one home and one away game

Below is the ideal schedule for Season 64. I know we are not going to hit this exactly. If you can schedule a game against the same opponent but in a different week, go ahead and do that. There will also be some cases where we can't hit these pairings because some schedules are already full. For example, I think one of the teams that my Carthage boys are seeded to play against already has a full schedule. In that case, I might seek out another team from the same conference to play, but that won't be officially part of the Challenge because that will lead to an unbalanced schedule. Let's see how many 'seeded matchups' we can get for Season 64, and go from there.

Week 8 -- CCIW off
#1 Frostburg St. at John Jay
#2 City College of NY at King's
#3 Farleigh Dickinson, Florham at York (NY)
#4 Staten Island at Wilkes
#5 Scranton at Brooklyn
#6 Hunter at Drew
#7 Carnegie Mellon at New York City Tech.
#8 Baruch at Delaware Valley
#9 DeSales at Medger Evers
#10 Polytechnic at Penn St, Behrend
#11 Lake Erie at Lehman College
#12 Bard at Lycoming

Week 9 -- Freedom off
#1 John Jay at Martin Luther
#2 Northland at City College of NY
#3 York (NY) at North Park
#4 Carthage at Staten Island
#5 Brooklyn at Millikin
#6 Illinois Wesleyan at Hunter
#7 New York City Tech. at Elmhurst
#8 Wheaton at Baruch
#9 Medger Evers at Milwaukee Engineering
#10 N. Central at Polytechnic
#11 Lehman College at Augustana
#12 Wisconsin Lutheran at Bard

Please let me know if something looks inaccurate, or if you have any other questions.

I'm also going to post the Season 63 slate of Challenge games to this post later today and keep track of them as we go.

Hey will, I'm only going to be keeping track of games where both teams are the same seed - only those results will count officially towards the Challenge records. I'm doing that for two reasons: 1) fewer games to keep track of (a lot of us have extra games scheduled with teams in the other two conferences), and 2) it is easier to make head-to-head comparisons when only considering games vs the same seeds. I know the seeding system is imperfect, but it gets a lot more complicated to measure the winners and losers when some schools play two games against the other conferences while other schools have four or five against varying levels of opposition. I'm glad to see you scheduled the extra game to help build some additional inter-conference rivalry though!

Great job doing this. Actually he reached out to me. My schedule was full except for week 10 anyway, so I think this was an attempt to fit it in. I had reached out to a couple teams in both conferences but didn't hear from them during recruiting. Good luck

After Week 8, CCIW has played all but one game and leads the challenge with 13 wins, 9 losses. CUNY (3-9) cannot win the challenge this year even if they win all of their remaining games, but Freedom (7-5) still can. There is one CCIW-Freedom game left (Northland at Wilkes in Week 10 -- #1 vs #10!) and eight CUNY-Freedom games left. If we use winning percentage as the basis for determining the best conference, here are the two main scenarios that could play out:

If Northland beats Wilkes -- Freedom will need to go 6-2 or better in their other eight games to win the Challenge.
If Wilkes beats Northland -- Freedom will only need to go 4-4 or better to win the Challenge.

UPDATE WEEK 9 -- apparently Freedom didn't want this to go down to Week 10 -- they went an impressive 6-1 vs CUNY in Week 9 and are now at 13 wins, 6 losses. Even if Freedom were to lose both Week 10 games, that would put Freedom at 13-8 and CCIW at 14-9; in that scenario Freedom would still have a slender advantage in winning percentage (.619 vs .609). So congrats to Freedom on winning the Challenge for Season 63!

Here are the Challenge games to be scheduled for Season 65 -- if you are interested in participating, go ahead and get these games on your non-conference schedules for next year as soon as you can once scheduling opens up. Let me know if you have questions -- thanks!

We got about two-thirds of the intended Challenge games on the schedule for Season 64, which is a pretty good result given the delay in getting the schedule out. The results will be updated each day below. Don't forget to schedule your Challenge games for Season 65 if you haven't already!

The Season 64 Challenge is as tight as can be, with one game separating first and third heading into the two Week 10 games. In Week 9 the top two CCIW seeds came through with wins but CUNY swept the bottom four games; as a result CUNY holds a slender lead for the first time with a 7-6 record. CCIW is a half-game back at 8-8 and Freedom still has a shot with a 6-7 record.

No pressure on New York City Tech., but they need to beat Carnegie Mellon to secure a victory for CUNY. If Carengie Mellon wins then the Challenge will come down to the Drew/IL Wesleyan game -- whoever wins that one will win the Challenge for their conference. CUNY and Freedom have their fate in their own hands; CCIW needs a win plus help from Carnegie Mellon to get it done.

Carnegie Mellon and Drew both came through with wins in Week 10 and as a result the Freedom Conference won the CCIW-CUNY-Freedom Challenge for Season 64. Congrats to Freedom and thanks to everyone who participated.